Monthly Archives: November, 2024
Celeste Shen, ‘Fair Use, Licensing, and Authors’ Rights in the Age of Generative AI’
ABSTRACT The rise of generative AI technologies has introduced unprecedented challenges to copyright law, particularly around the fair use of copyrighted works in AI training processes. Generative AI tools, such as ChatGPT, are trained on vast datasets that often include copyrighted material, typically without the consent of authors or compensation for use. This widespread, unauthorized […]
Avery, Abril and del Riego, ‘Attributing AI Authorship: Towards a System of Icons for Legal and Ethical Disclosure’
ABSTRACT Over the past year, the pervasive role of large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence (AI) in text generation has precipitated concerns about ethical usage, authorship, and transparent attribution. This has been true in legal practice, academia, and the corporate world, as well as in countless other arenas. In this Article, we identify the […]
‘Preempting Toxic Torts: Third Circuit Opens Split on Cancer Warnings in Schaffner v Monsanto’
Pesticides can cause cancer. For that reason, they have long been the subject of state regulation. However, pesticide manufacturers like Monsanto Company have attempted to utilize the preemption doctrine to avoid liability for their carcinogenic products. After its arguments were unsuccessful in the Ninth and Eleventh Circuits, Monsanto’s claim that a federal pesticide regulation preempted […]
Michael Carroll, ‘Tailoring Intellectual Property Rights to Reduce Uniformity Cost’
ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on solutions to a second-order problem that arises with the creation of intellectual property (IP) rights – the problem of uniformity cost. The incentives created by one-size-fits-all patents and copyrights often are misaligned with those necessary to attract the optimal level of investment of capital and creative labor. Uniformity cost is […]
Tana Pistorius, ‘The IP Protection of Electronic Databases: Copyright or Copywrong?’
ABSTRACT The protection of the intellectual investments embodied in databases is of the utmost importance. Technological innovation has rendered databases vulnerable to unauthorised access, reproduction, adaptation and publication. The copyright protection of databases is not always adequate to address the protection of non-original databases. Vast collections of data are thus vulnerable to information security threats. […]
Joan Stearns Johnsen, ‘Less Litigation, More Business Purpose: Leveraging Dispute Prevention to Preserve Business Relationships’
ABSTRACT Strong interorganizational relationships play an essential role in business relationships. Soft skills associated with negotiation and communication are key to dealing with disagreements in these relationships. However, many companies do not invest in these aspects of their business relationships until conflicts arise. Dispute resolution provides helpful processes for managing these disputes, but companies can […]
‘Consumer Contracts Have Many Problems, but “Readability” May Not Be One’
Yonathan A Arbel, ‘The Readability of Contracts: Big Data Analysis’, 21 Journal of Empirical Legal Studies (forthcoming, 2024), available at SSRN (January 1, 2023). Probably all law professors, even textualists, have experienced frustrations with overly rigid applications of supposed rules about language. For example, they’ve encountered editors who require that all contractions be spelled out […]
Gregory Mitchell, ‘Small World Behavioral Law and Economics’
ABSTRACT The history of public policy is littered with failures to solve large-scale social problems using interventions derived from behavioral science theories. In contrast, numerous small-scale problems have been solved through applications of behavioral science. This difference in outcomes reflects a mismatch between methods and aspirations. Behavioral science research relies on small world studies to […]
Tabrez Ebrahim, ‘Comparative Intellectual Property and Religion’
ABSTRACT This Article introduces religion to comparative IP scholarship and explains how faith-based considerations can enhance it. Comparative IP scholars have extensively studied different IP laws in different jurisdictions, but they seemed to suggest an erroneous view that comparative IP and religion are like two parallel lines without intersection. Building on these scholars’ work, this […]
Hui, Oh, She and Yeung, ‘Contract Contingencies and Uncertainty: Evidence from Product Market Contracts’
ABSTRACT We study contingencies written in firms’ material product market contracts, focusing on the theoretical prediction of uncertainty as an important determinant. We identify contract contingencies from firms’ public regulatory filings and examine the effects of general business uncertainty and specific innovation-related uncertainty. To enhance causal inference, we utilize two major business shocks (ie, the […]